This giveaway is now closed! The winner is Andrea (andrea_merrigan@…)!

Softness and gentleness are probably at the top of your tissue-buying criteria.

But what about environmentally responsible production?

Scotties Facial Tissue is leading this charge with a commitment to plant three trees for every one they use. In fact, they’re so committed to this that they work with third-party auditors, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and the Responsible Forest Project (RFP) to ensure the highest level of accountability and responsibility.

In fact, J.D. Irving, the Scotties Facial Tissue parent company, has planted over 800 million trees in the last 50 years!

Their commitment to sustainable practices doesn’t mean that your nose has to suffer, though! While I’m sure we’ve all used tissues that would be better marketed as thin paper towels, the Scotties Softest Ever Tissues are thick, soft and hypoallergenic.

Enter to Win

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. This week, Scotties is giving one lucky Life…Your Way reader a huge box full of tissues!

To enter, tell me how many trees you think would be planted if you purchased Scotties brand tissues for a year:

This giveaway ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on Friday, 2/10. The winner will be selected randomly and notified by email, and this post will be updated with their name as well!

Giveaway: Scotties Tissues for Your Nose AND the Environment is a post from Life...Your Way

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The following post is from Katie of Kitchen Stewardship:

Open mouth, insert…juice boxes?

Sometimes I say things without thinking.

We’d been at my son’s new school for about a month when I visited for the Christmas party. (And yes, they did actually call it a Christmas party in a public school. Kind of refreshing, I thought.)

The kids were all starting to clean up and throw away their Capri Sun juice pouches, when my green consciousness kicked in. It was like a no-waste reflex, a gut reaction that couldn’t be stopped.

“Did you know those can be recycled?” I blurted out to the teacher. “I can look into how to do it…I’ll take them home.”

Open mouth, insert foot. Foot tastes like juice.

A month later, I find myself the coordinator for the Terracycle juice pouch collection project for the entire K-4 school.

Luckily, the rewards are good: both the school and the earth benefit.

Terracycle recycles and re-purposes foil juice pouches of all brands and pays the school two cents per pouch.

Our job (my 6-year-old son is my team member!) will be to collect the pouches from the cafeteria, and when we reach one thousand, we can request a postage-paid shipping label from Terracycle and send them in. (The rules just changed, however, and we only get one cent per pouch unless our shipment includes 5,000+ pouches. Phew.)

It’s been quite gratifying to see so visually how much waste we can save from being trashed each week.

Week One:

source: Kitchen Stewardship

Week Two:

source: Kitchen Stewardship

If you’re looking for a way to teach your child a little eco-conscious activism, I highly recommend looking into Terracycle. Juice pouches aren’t the only thing they collect, either.

Here’s all we had to do:

1. Register an account online. This took 5-10 minutes.

2. Get the principal’s approval. My son’s teacher is 100% behind me, so that was painless and quick via email.

3. Make a box. This was a good craft project for the whole family and took about half an hour to an hour. One could easily just buy a plastic tub, too, but I am a fervent repurposer…

source: Kitchen Stewardship

source: Kitchen Stewardship

source: Kitchen Stewardship

4. Type up a sign for the box. My job, 15 minutes.

5. Type a letter of explanation for the parent newsletter and communicate with the principal:

It’s always great to get a 2-for-1 deal, especially when it helps our kids and supports Brown Elementary. Our school can get two benefits with one simple action: recycling drink pouches (such as Capri Sun) will earn money for Brown AND help save the Earth by reducing waste in our landfills.

There’s a new box in the cafe for collections – please encourage your child(ren) to put any brand of drink pouches (the foil kind, not drink boxes) in the box. Removing the straw first will be a big help. If you send in juice pouches for classroom parties, help remind the teacher to send a student down to the cafe with the empties.

Thank you so much for participating! You can see more info at terracycle.com.

6. Collect the pouches. I pick up the kids one day a week anyway; so, we’ve been grabbing the pouches at that time. Our box has been just the right size!

7. Here’s the hard part, and the job we haven’t done yet: counting the pouches. The Terracycle website tells us that 1,000 pouches weighs about nine pounds, so I’m pretty tempted to just go that route. Maybe we’ll count the first 100 just to see what one hundred looks like, and then go by weight.

What are YOU going to do?

Whether you can find a Terracycle “brigade” to coordinate or not, set a goal to raise the green consciousness of your children in any way you can. It brought joy to my heart to hear my son pushing me, “Come on, Mom, we gotta get that box done – I see kids throwing away the juice pouches every day and it’s such waste!”

He was pretty pumped that the first day we collected, after only four days of the program being school-wide, the box was full. Saving the earth can be pretty exciting.

I’m just hoping that I don’t taste juicy foot in my mouth when we get to the whole “storing up five thousand juice pouches” part. Good thing we have a 2-car garage now!

Can you think of a way to help your child’s school (or your workplace) be more eco-friendly?

	Katie Kimball is a mom of three who spends a ton of time in the kitchen making real food with whole ingredients and then blogs about her successes and failures at Kitchen Stewardship. She believes everything in life is a gift from God and should be taken care of wisely.

See My First Grader Save the Earth…from Juice Pouches! is a post from Life...Your Way

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source: Mandi Ehman

Embarrassing confession time: since having babies, my hormones seem to be a lot more active, and there have been times that I’ve resorted to buying the expensive “prescription strength” deodorant to deal with the excessive sweating and resulting odor. This is especially true in those first few postpartum weeks, but I’ve found my sweat glands to be more active in general in the past few years.

However, deodorant is one of those things I’ve always been wary of. I haven’t really ever worn antiperspirant because the idea of stopping my body from doing something it was created to do doesn’t sit well with me.

There are also many people who believe sweating is one way our body rids itself of toxins; although the mainstream medical community doesn’t support this claim. In addition, antiperspirants also contains aluminum, which may contribute to Alzheimer’s, breast cancer and other diseases. Even regular deodorant contains many chemicals that I avoid in general, such as triclosan and artificial fragrances.

Frankly, while those connections haven’t been proven, I figure better safe than sorry. For a while I was simply patting my underarms with baking soda, which is very effective. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit irritating.

Last year I took it  a step further and decided to try making my own deodorant. It’s easy, inexpensive and the most effective deodorant I’ve ever used!

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup baking soda
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 5 tablespoons coconut oil
• essential oils, optional

Directions:

Mix the baking soda and cornstarch together in a bowl. Add the coconut oil. Mix well. You can also add essential oils for a more noticeable scent, but it’s not necessary.

Note: If it’s as cold in your house as it is in ours right now, you may need to warm the coconut oil up a bit first to make it soft enough to mix! I recommend doing that on the stove rather than the microwave. Or wait until after dinner and stick a bowl of coconut oil in the oven for a few minutes while it cools.

Store in a jar with a tight lid or transfer to an empty deodorant container.

Coconut oil’s melting point is just 76 degrees. The baking soda and cornstarch will give it a thicker consistency, but you may still want to keep it in the refrigerator during warmer months!

Have you tried homemade deodorant?

	Mandi Ehman is the founder and publisher behind Life…Your Way and the co-author of All in Good Time, as well as a wife and the homeschooling mom to four beautiful girls. She lives with her family on a little slice of heaven in wild, wonderful West Virginia and loves coffee, chocolate, easy meals, beautiful things and minimalist spaces.

Homemade Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Deodorant is a post from Life...Your Way

© 2010-2012 Purple Martin Press, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Green Your Way subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please send an email to contact@yourway.net to let us know. Thanks.

source: pantagrapher

I’ve been blogging in this space — first Organizing Your Way and then Life…Your Way — for over three years now, and there are some great posts in the archives that don’t get much attention anymore. This week, I’ll be sharing some of my favorites. Whether you’ve been around since the beginning or are a new reader, I think you’ll enjoy them!

First, a confession: At this moment, I have a few commercial bathroom cleaners in our “cleaning bucket”, which we keep on the top shelf in our laundry room. I’m not sure when or why I stopped using vinegar as the base for most of my cleaning needs, but I’m determined to move back to more natural cleaners — not only because of concerns for the environment and my family’s health, but also because they’re less expensive. Because you can make a variety of cleaners from the same set of ingredients, homemade cleaners are also simpler, although it may not feel like it when you’re first getting started.

Today, I’ve compiled a list of natural bathroom cleaning tips to finish off our bathroom series. I have a feeling that this list is just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to share your tips in the comments as well so that we can all learn from each other!

Sparkling Mirrors

• As I was researching this post, I read more than one article that said the key to clean mirrors is using warm water and nothing else. But here’s a tip: if you have mineral-rich water (like we do!), use bottled water instead.

• To avoid ruining your mirrors, spray cleaners on your rag instead of the mirror.

• Use newspaper instead of a rag for lint-free mirrors (and windows!)

• Mix 2 tsp. vinegar into 1 qt. of water in a spray bottle.¹

• Mix 1/3 cup white vinegar and 1/4 cup rubbing alcohol with 32 oz. water.²

• Use club soda plus 1 tsp. lemon juice in a spray bottle.³

Cleaning the Toilet

• To avoid toilet bowl rings, pour 1-2 cups of white vinegar into the toilet tank once a month.

• To get rid of toilet bowl rings, soak old rags or heavy duty paper towels in vinegar. Empty the toilet bowl and line it with the paper towels, adding more vinegar as they dry. Leave them in place for up to 12 hours, as needed.⁴

• In a pinch, use a can of coke to clean your toilet bowl.⁵

• Use Tang as a natural citrus cleaner. Scoop it into the toilet, let it dissolve and sit, and then scrub it with the toilet bowl brush before flushing.⁶

A Sink That Shines

• To clean water deposits around faucets and drains, soak a paper towel in white vinegar and lay around the fixture.

• Use club soda to shine plumbing fixtures.³

• To prevent buildup in the drain, pour 1 cup of baking soda and then 1 cup of white vinegar down the drain. After an hour, flush the drain with warm water.²

Grime-Free Shower

• For spot-free shower doors and walls, wipe with car wax or rain-x every six months. (Okay, this one isn’t really a green solution, but I couldn’t resist including it!)

• Keep a squeegee in your shower stall for drying the door after each use.

• For really bad soap scum build up, boil white vinegar in a pot or in the microwave and pour it on the walls. Be sure to wear gloves and avoid inhaling the steam.

• Wash plastic shower curtains in the washing machine.²

• To clean your shower head, soak it in warm vinegar for half an hour.⁷

More Bathroom Cleaning Tips

• Use a steam cleaner for cleaning and disinfecting without any cleaners. I’ll admit this is on my wishlist! Steam cleaners cost anywhere from $35 to $500, but most of the inexpensive ones have poor reviews. I’m leaning toward this all-purpose steam cleaner, which is normally priced at $150 but currently on sale for $79.99.

• Make a natural floor cleaner by mixing 1/4 cup non-toxic, biodegradable dish soap with 1/2 cup white vinegar and 2 gallons of warm water.¹

• Use equal parts white vinegar and water as an all-purpose cleaner.¹

• Create a scouring paste by combining baking soda, a squirt of non-toxic, biodegradable dish soap and a squeeze of lemon into a thick paste. For stubborn grime, leave for 10 to 15 minutes before rinsing.¹

For more natural cleaning tips and information about the dangers in most commercial cleaners, visit Kitchen Stewardship’s Spring Cleaning Carnival topic, Get the Antibacterials Out.

Sources:

1 — Simple Organic
2 — Do It Yourself
3 — Green America
4 — Creative Homemaking
5 — Lifehacker
6 — Old Fashioned Living
7 — Mrs. Clean

What other bathroom cleaning tips or natural cleaning recipes do you have to add to the list?

	Mandi Ehman is the founder and publisher behind Life…Your Way and the co-author of All in Good Time, as well as a wife and the homeschooling mom to four beautiful girls. She lives with her family on a little slice of heaven in wild, wonderful West Virginia and loves coffee, chocolate, easy meals, beautiful things and minimalist spaces.

Easy, Natural Bathroom Cleaners and Tips is a post from Life...Your Way

© 2010-2012 Purple Martin Press, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Green Your Way subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please send an email to contact@yourway.net to let us know. Thanks.